 Yeah, hello guys, it's a privilege to be here last street. I hope it's gonna be treat for you So I'm here to talk about the how to run mobile games as a business But there's a lot of false misconceptions about what the games are you just a lot of guys just get lucky But I think wanted to share our story how a small team could really challenge the big boys and How we could reach against impossible odds to top crossing positions with the initially a team of 12 people Our company's Small giant was initially founded on this premise that that small highly motivated and experienced teams can do gigantic things Given that we can utilize the the platforms Ups stores in place and there's a lot of technology to be leveraged and Before we go into the actual the subject matter of the presentation I'll say a few words about small giant so that you get a little bit of a Sort of familiar how big this small thing of ours has grown So we're currently International team of 44 people based right here in Helsinki As far as we know we were the fastest growing company in the Nordics last year And to give you a little bit of scale of the numbers so last year we did 33 million dollars in revenue and as of last month We we were at 200 over 275 million dollar run revenue run rate So averaging the last last month and multiplying that by 3365 and very importantly We have been profitable over a year now And last financing around which was mentioned here that we did a 41 million dollar a secondary round with EQT ventures of Sweden In January Because we were already profitable profitable at that time now So coming back to our story that how a small team was really able to challenge the big guys and As as with many other games companies we started you know with bright vision and you know a lot of eagerness And we created two casual games called oddwinks escape and rope racers and They were super beautiful a lot of laugh and skill went into those games But in hindsight they really didn't have a chance at all to break into top top 50 top Then the one cross top one crossing position because there were a lot of flaws in those games in terms of structural design in Terms of positioning mismatches and various other things But we really took it serious because we we had this like urge that we want to do something really meaningfully big And we said you know, what does it take? To actually create a game that would actually get us to top 50 crossing positions as our good friends at Romeo As our good friends at Supercell had done and and being you know like real fins We basically roll up our sleeves and and started doing a lot of research and work. So basically On game design really went through basically 50 top games Down to the progressive mathematics of them. What and what are the components of successful games? What are the components of not so successful games? We look at the market trends very carefully that where the where the consumers or players are shifting And we also did a lot of prototyping so to find the perfect perfect game And one of the things that actually drove our development of Empires and Puzzles was this very simplistic strategic insight that was like two and a half years ago that that casual and mid-core games gamers are sort of starting to converge And what does this mean? It's basically that on the other hand We have about a billion plus daily active users on casual games like candy crass or versions of Angry Birds or Garden scapes what have you and these games are incredibly fun and accessible the beautifully made it's fun to play easy to start playing them Whereas on the other hand you have these guys You have these mid-core advanced mid-core games like Summary's War or Contest of Champions or back in the day game of war From the US and these games are very complicated But they also have the depth and the structure to actually become a really deep hobbies for people and they will Trigger a lot of engagement and also a lot of monetization opportunities But from our perspective when we were looking at these games We said hang on a minute why in the world are they so incredibly difficult to play for normal people? So the onboarding in our opinion was quite quite flawed And we said hang on a minute Could we actually create a game that would actually bridge these two worlds that we could actually start Converting or an offering a lot of casual advanced players a new way to stop playing a game that would feel familiar It would be easy to get into but would would actually cater for very very long engagement and sort of activity levels and And basically our game team did an amazing job in creating this fantastic prototype of completely new type of mastery battling And and very clever inside of actually that no for some reason no one had actually used The combination of base building a lot of hero collection and the mastery in a core package And that's what we started executing on and really catch fire very quickly after our initial test And the result was really an accessible and deep role-playing game now Here's a little video Okay, that was the 32nd crash course into the world of empires and puzzles But before going into the sort of the reasons on why how we run Mobile games as a business very quickly some of the actual results. So we were chosen by Google Play as the 2018 best breakthrough hit game of the year, which is like a massive recognition for our really really small team Apple has given us a lot of attention by giving you know game of the day and various other things But we also won the prestigious Finnish mobile game awards also this year But more importantly, you know, we've grown very steadily We have about 4.5 million active monthly active users the moment very active user base almost 40% stickiness ratio and about 1.6 1.7 million daily active users as we as we speak and This incredibly good KPIs have led to the fact that we actually not on did not only get to top 50 But we've been top one position in 36 markets around the world and top 10 incredibly in 100 markets Which is feels completely crazy in a given our predicament about two years ago We were really really small company just dreaming about these things and obviously, you know We still have China and Japan and Korea to conquer. We haven't launched a game there at all and and these you know this this game and the KPIs the amount of users has led us to very very very fast growth and here's the quarterly revenue development for the company and We're gonna do pretty massive amounts of revenues this year and also next year and Very importantly, we are spending over 90 million dollars in performance marketing to drive the game Very profitably and this is one of the key areas that I'm gonna talk about you in a second that how is it possible? That what what does it take to get to this position? Okay, let's move on to the actual what are the success factors of running games as a business The first one is really important. It's the company culture because you know as you know all high-performing companies are really Essentially a collection of really good individuals working together towards the same goal and for us We've had always this notion from the very beginning that you know ultra efficiency in everything that we do Meaning that that we really try to avoid this communication overhead problem that which slows or kills companies That there are not too many people discussing or giving opinions about one particular problem And was unless the core team really needs that opinion and this gives us you know it's really meaningful for anyone that everyone has a lot of responsibility and They they know that they can make move on very quickly as needed The second aspect of running this business is that you have to be really rigorous in decision-making You can't have debate things about things too quickly But make sure that you really focus your small efforts on on the most impactful things and a given seven given day Or a given week so you don't throw too many balls up in the same time but you only have one or two balls which you really executing quickly and then Coming back to the next point which is really about the speed and quality so rather than Theoretizing about things and you know ventilating about them. Let's get it done Let's get it measured very quickly so we can see the results Sometimes at the expense of quality because one of the cardinal sins in our first games is that we we went to this bit of a Pixel polishing mode which is completely non-productive at the end of the day. It doesn't matter What matters is completely other things and we we really wanted to avoid this going forward and then Obviously, it's all about this is constantly evolving super competitive Environment you have to learn all the time. So Analytics is our like pumping heart. We measure everything. We analyze everything deeply We even build our own analytic systems from the ground up just to make sure that they serve our needs But we also learn from our players We we test all of the main features with you know hundreds of beta testers around the world Just to make sure that we don't do something stupid and they are all of the glitches are ironed out with top players We also do a lot of active participation in and community forums and Our developers and community people are discussing with top players about the future and but also the current issues and good things about the game And a very important thing about the culture is that you know, we talked to each other We have a really interesting mix of super talented young young folks coming directly from university coupled with you know, super heavy weights of the industry and Basically, it's kind of incredible to see that wherever there's a good idea No one really cares where the good idea comes from whether that's from a junior guy who just joined two weeks ago or from our For a more experienced guy. We are very quickly to change our way of working and practices is if needed and Then the last point I can't stress enough You have to learn for your competitors. You have to deeply, you know Understand why are they successful? Why are they not successful? Who who are they and where they're operating and just having that sort of in the back of your head that you have to keeps you Keeps you the pace and cadence cadence Very very sort of high so that you understand what's what's coming behind who behind you or what would you have in front of you? now the the success of running a successful mobile games company in my opinion is something called what I call often mastering the company full stack And in our case we really had to master all of the following areas But let's start with the obvious one the game design So you obviously if you're in the business of games, you need to have people who who who know how to make good games You what what are the structures? How do you position the game all that stuff? Then another obvious thing is that you need to be have really solid in the actual development of the game the technology The server side in the client side technology and so forth And then the third areas of another obvious one creative designs or audio-visual thing the storytelling Those kind of parts and I would say that most of the games companies are relatively good at this Maybe not so on game design, but the problem is that most young game companies and we also did that a little bit in the early days that a Lot of folks think that this is the business of games and it they couldn't be further from the truth Because if you don't have the next one with this analytics, you have nothing You have to deeply understand how the game works and how the conversion funnels before users got to the game in terms of user Acquisition work and and and basically that that leads to the dark arts of performance marketing in it is so incredibly competitive over 700 games are launched every single day and Just cut through the clutter. You have to be really good in performance marketing You need to know that your cost per acquisition It's gonna be less than your lifetime value that you're gonna extract from those users and you have to have those mathematical equations And systems in place to manage the you know incredible complexity you have there I will talk about that in a second and Then that leads to another area, which is business modeling. So you have to be able to put the game The analytics and the marketing piece into a sort of a model so that you can actually run it as a busy You know, what are the levers to change and adapt and you know to have a constant evolution as you go along? Because that then will turn lead to financing because chances are that you could a need You know decent amount of money to get the baby off the ground even if you have really good numbers Because virality in today's market is very very difficult and almost no one can sort of plan for it And that's why you better be prepared to have a solid model that you can actually you know in invest into the growth Then the two remaining areas are very important once you have taken the baby off the ground is life operations Which is about keeping the game fresh and fun and engaging Every day every week in addition to the normal feature Delivery that you do obviously And then the last one is of course super important, which is community Support community nurturing and player support This is a very important part because all of the successful games today are very social in nature And you have to put a lot of effort and sort of best practices into this area as well So this is the what are we called the company full stack and then now a few examples about each of these areas So that you understand what it doesn't mean in practice and the first one is the the analytics piece So where we really wanted to go to full flexibility and Accuracy so that you know instead of using third-party tools we chose to actually build our own and We honestly feel that you know having this in-house analytics tool and a really data-focused culture is actually one of our competitive advantages and here's an example of a Revenue distribution by a lifetime spend one of the dashboards that we use quite frequently is that we launch One of the desirable monthly heroes with the premise that you know It should resonate really well with the top top spending Lifetime spenders and and as you can see the dense there were exactly what we're hoping they resonate it and they really engage with With the new new characters and other aspects other pieces of analysis that we do as an example is the you know different kinds of Spender segmentation analysis we look at you know how people behave how they respond to offers And also what kind of offers we do sort of optimizing on price points and bundle packs that and all you know Which which stage of their lifetime of players should we actually offer them something and of course looking at the player? behavior inside the game so that we can optimize and find better features better offers or events for them Second area is feature development, which is pretty obvious So this is an example of a feature that that we launched in August very successful huge feature We took us a long time to test with players And basically 270 new levels new new heroes it re-engaging some of the old all Heroes from the game and completely new sort of summoning mechanic which has completely new price levels But these are the kind of things that you know come periodically Which are obviously super important because the net game should never stop Then another example is of the life operations point of view These are the monthly monthly challenge events that we run. This is one of the one of the events which is the empire themed And and the job of that is really to create this monthly spike of excitement if you like and and and basically Offer also a new type of play experience, you know having new unique new monsters heroes art music and so forth and then Moving on to the most expensive area of the business I mentioned the the 90 million sort of a marketing spend and and How do we optimize that you because you know we better be sure that we know what we're doing because otherwise We would run out of money, you know very quickly and I was literally super nervous when we started You know after the launch the game with you know the first million went out of for my bank account I was literally super nervous the holy shit that better come back But but that happened so so basically, you know so-called top of the final optimization is incredibly important here so how do you actually optimize the click-through rates and the sort of the people getting getting people to download your game from the app store so we do Continuous app store optimization experiments using the Google Play experiments tool and just you know having this data Exercise going on every single day every single week And then moving on to the even more towards the top of the funnel, which is the creatives the video ads that we do Just to give you an example of the scale that our incredible Five only five person team which is running it won't close to a hundred million dollar marketing budget how clever these guys are So we are actually having over 1500 video ad versions that we run across all of our markets across different networks and just against various, you know targeting criteria on the market And and to conclude this sort of a short session I wanted to show you a couple of examples of the video ads that we've done the first one is really inspired by Tinder Which we use to acquire female users to our game and This is an in-house production from the team. Yeah, who wouldn't have a one wanted to have a date with the monster, huh? Okay, so this was one example the other example is you know when we are going after a more mid-core Gamer audiences, you know more guy guy thingy So here's another video that we did with one of our partners To address that particular target segment. Yeah, so it's a bit of a fake news, but you know you continue the game But it works Okay, so so basically I just wanted to conclude here So in in our opinion the in the business of games is really Mastering the company full stack and you really have to take all of the boxes And if you're a new team, you don't have to take all of the boxes right away like in our Case, you know, it was really the area of performance marketing and perhaps life ops Which were the ones that we were not very good at we were we were really decisive that we knew that we need to get Right people so we we were super happy to find the best people on the planet to run that show for us And also develop the capability on life ops as well, but that's it from for me I thank you so much for listening. I'd be happy to answer any questions if you might have. Thank you